


The Easy Path

by aban_asaara



Series: Month of Fanfiction 2017 [8]
Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Arguing, F/M, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-09
Updated: 2017-08-09
Packaged: 2019-10-05 02:07:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17316068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aban_asaara/pseuds/aban_asaara
Summary: Leandra learns of the budding romance between her daughter and the escaped slave from Tevinter.





	The Easy Path

**Author's Note:**

> Month of Fanfiction - Day 9 - An Argument. This conversation is referenced in the “Amabel” chapter of [For What Binds Us](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13412835/chapters/30732354), as I wrote this back when FWBU was just burgeoning in my brain. :D

Her mother comes rushing down the stairs with a bounce to her step that Hawke hasn’t seen in years. “Oh, darling, you’re back! I’ve great news!”

“Good to see you too, Mother,” she says with a smile, her neck cracking and popping as she stretches.  


Leandra laughs, then drops a peck on each of Hawke’s cheeks before pulling back with only the slightest wrinkling of her nose, Maker bless her. Arcane horror and undead must not make for the most charming bouquet. “We’re invited to the Harimanns’ tomorrow evening,” she starts while Hawke peels the stiffened gloves off her hands, “and Seneschal Bran and his son will be there.”

Hawke sniffs at the gauntlet and scrunches up her face at the rank smell of blood- and sweat-soaked leather. She thanks Bodahn as he helps her shrug off the tattered remains of her leather chestpiece, then turns back to her mother’s expectant face. “Sorry, Mother, did you say—Seneschal Bran?” Laughter breaks out of her despite the fatigue. “Oh, that’s too good. He hates me enough as it is, I can’t imagine if I start insinuating myself in the same social circles. Pass, though. Tomorrow is Wicked Grace night,” she adds, kicking off her boots before plodding towards the promise of a hot bath. The cold of the Sundermount caverns has burrowed into the very marrow of bones, leaving her limbs stiff and sore, yet she can’t shake the goofy grin off her face, altogether too wide for someone who slept with a rock for a pillow and woke with her mouth full of pine needles.

Blazes, but she’d go back in a heartbeat if it meant having Fenris rub the feeling back into her frozen toes again.

“You have your Wicked Grace nights _every week_ ,” her mother protests, following her to the bottom of the stairs. “Do me a favour just this once? Besides, I’m certain the Seneschal would come around if he saw you under different circumstances. You’re beautiful, and charming, and I have it on good authority that you’ve caught his son’s eye.”

Her foot hovers on the last step. “I can give it back if he wants.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“His eye—I’ve caught his—never mind. I appreciate it, Mother, but I’ve been looking forward to tomorrow night.” Her stomach twists with guilt, just like every other time she’s displeased her mother since they left Ferelden, Bethany’s broken body turned to smoke and ash on a mountain path far behind them.

“Can’t your friends push it back a day, perhaps?” Leandra says, so sensible it hurts.

“I suppose I could ask,” Hawke starts, trying not to sound too petulant, “but most of Aveline’s nights are taken up by the Guard, and Sebastian has evening services on Fridays. Can it really not wait until the next noble shindig? I can’t imagine they will miss me much, considering they still grumble about the Maker-damned refugee dog lords ruining Hightown.”

“And that is exactly why you should come. You’ve moved up in the world, and it will do you no good to pretend otherwise. Having friends among the nobility can make a world of difference when you least expect it. And who knows? You might meet someone there,” she adds offhandedly, and everything falls into place then, “whether it’s the Seneschal’s son or—”

“Mother,” Hawke blurts out, “there’s someone else already.”

The words are out of her mouth before she even _thinks_ them, too swift for her to swallow back. Not that she minds anyone knowing: even Merrill has to know after being stuck with the two of them on Sundermount for three days, and it’d be pinned to the Chantry board were it up to Hawke, but the spring-green shoot just budding between Fenris and her is still so fragile that she meant to keep it clutched to herself a while longer, out of the wind and freezing rain.

And—well. There was an undeniable thrill to it, winding tighter in her stomach with each kiss she stole from him in the caves, pitch-black except for the constellations of glow-worms gleaming overhead. Easy enough to shine a mote of magelight down the tunnels, but much more fun to wave her hands in front of her without seeing them, fingers outstretched to feel her way around the stalagmites (or stalactites?) until she brushed the polished steel of his chestpiece. She missed his mouth by a mile in the dark, bumping her nose against his chin instead; his laughter rumbled under her hands as they lay splayed on his chest before he took pity on her, cupping her face to kiss her while the others fumbled about, only a few paces away. The lyrium carved into the palms of his hands hummed against her cheeks, and his breath was fragrant with the sprig of mint he’d been chewing on his way up the mountain.

Afterwards, it was the glow of his markings that lit their way out of the cave. The faint glimmer on the slick flowstone was not unlike that of the glow-worms sticking to the high vault, but Hawke was so taken in the moment that she squandered the setup for the jest of the age.

But now that it’s out, she wishes she could tuck her secret back to safety, away from her mother’s flint-eyed scrutiny. “Someone else? That elf? A _slave_?”

“A _former_ slave,” Hawke retorts, wounded.

“From Tevinter!”

“From Seheron, actually,” she says, trying for levity, but her mother pins her into place with a look.

“That’s beside the point. You had to teach him to read!”

Heat creeps up her face at that. He wouldn’t show it, of course, but she knows just how _hurt_ Fenris would be if he heard that, and the mere thought is enough to fog her eyes. “He can _now_ , and it’s not his fault that he—” Her hands ball into fists. A scream rises to her mouth and escapes through her teeth in a strangled noise when she tries to bite it down. “For the Maker’s sake, Mother, I shouldn’t even have to _say_ it. Why don’t you just admit you don’t want another scandal in the family?”

Leandra lifts her chin. “And what if I said I don’t? Your father wouldn’t have dared _dream_ of such a life for his daughter. You have so much more than he ever had; you could live well, without having to run or hide, and it’s an ill bird that fouls its own nest.”

“Mother, this is _your_ world, not mine,” she starts, and she knows she will regret the rest but she can’t help it, “nor _Father’s_. It was enough that we had each other, wasn’t it? We Hawkes never needed a nest.”

Hurt scuds through her mother’s eyes. _You started it_ , Hawke wants to say, _by bringing Father into this_. Hawke has always been a Hawke, after all. Her father’s name fit like a pair of well-worn, supple leather boots, and she’d reach for it without thinking once she was old enough to work at Dane’s Refuge and travel on her own. No one forgot “Hawke” the way they did her first name, slippery as a measure of silk, sliding off people’s memory in the span of a breath.

She can’t part from it any more than she can her magic, even now that the Viscount has recognised her as the scion of the Amell line. Her mother’s stories of gilt nobility have always been shrouded in the same fairytale haze as Bethany’s romance novels, and to this day the difference between Amell and Hawke is like the sea that churns between Ferelden and the Free Marches: its waves break on both lands just as the blood of both families flows in her veins, but too often it feels like she stands on one shore, and her mother, on the other, trying to yell loud enough for the other to hear.

“Perhaps,” Leandra concedes at last with a sigh that softens the curve of her shoulders, “but just because I’ve done it and come out the other side doesn’t mean I want the same thing for you.”

“What—are you saying?” Hawke asks after a pause, unsure what to make of her mother’s words. “That you regret marrying Father? Having me?”

Her face crumples at that. “Oh, my darling, of course not. I’ve been going at it entirely the wrong way if you think that’s what I’ve been saying. You and Carver are what I have that’s most precious in this world.” The ghosts of Bethany and Malcolm sweep between them like a gust of wind at her words. “All I want for you is to be safe and happy.”

For a moment Hawke sees herself slipping on a gown to bat her lashes at Bran and his son, and then—and then what? Telling Fenris that his being a runaway slave and an elf did bother her after all? Keeping him as her paramour or whatever Hightown calls it, as if the very thought didn’t make her hair stand on end? She’d be safe, then, wilting away in her lord husband’s mansion, but happy?

No—if she’s learned anything from her father, it’s that happiness is fought for and hard won, not arranged and bargained like the trade agreements of the Merchants’ Guild. Happiness is green eyes and gauntleted hands, good-humoured arguments and glasses of wine by the fireplace, books read hushed and halting, and she’s no more able to send Fenris away than she can ignore the pleas for help that rise from the city’s every corner.

“Why can’t you just let me be happy in my own way, then?” Hawke asks, and without waiting for an answer, the words start pouring out of her under the surge of some emotion she can’t even name, a swell of anger cresting into affection and sorrow both. “ _Fenris_ makes me happy. Helping people makes me happy, and he keeps me safe while I do so. And if this is cause for scandal, then so be it. I won’t turn my back on him just to play pretend at the life that _you_ left behind when you broke off your betrothal and eloped with the Circle mage who got you pregnant.”

Leandra bristles. “Mind your tone, young woman.”

Hawke chuckles, a bitter, ugly thing that rises out of her despite herself. “What would people say, right? ‘Look at that hussy talking back to her mother, gallivanting about with knife-ears and—’”

Her name rips out of her mother’s mouth, hard as a palm across the face, and stuns her into silence. For an instant she is a child again, sniffling back tears after searing the tablecloth with a skillet.

“Boom,” Sandal says from the other end of the room, and the tension ripples out of the air like a string that snapped. The corners of Leandra’s mouth give a twitch as she raises her face to look at her, and Hawke finds herself looking into her eyes as though in a mirror: Amell eyes, blue and bright, passed down from mother to daughter, along with the curse of magic and a heart that loves too hard.

“I didn’t mean that,” she says, sitting down hard on the last step of the staircase. “I’m sorry, Mother.”

Leandra pinches her dress to lift the hem before starting up the stairs, the beading rustling with each step and gleaming across her ankles. Then she smoothes down her skirts before sitting down next to Hawke at the top of the staircase, uncharacteristically unladylike on the part of Leandra Hawke, née Amell. “And so am I,” she replies softly, close enough for Hawke to smell the dried lavender that scents her clothes. “I forget that you’re not a little girl anymore.”

“Haven’t been for a long time now, Mother,” she points out with a quirk of her mouth.

Leandra crosses her legs at the ankles and smiles. “Yet I look at you, and I still see you stumbling about in my shoes and your father’s cloak, calling yourself a magical dragon princess,” she says, then laughs as Hawke feels her cheeks burning. “That Fenris—does he treat you well, at least?”

Still flushed, Hawke hugs her knees over the warmth flooding her chest. “It’s … hard to explain. He’s a good man, but he was never allowed to be, if that makes sense, so it just comes out a bit sharp sometimes. He doesn’t smile too often but when he does at least you know he means it. And he knows so many things, he’s funny—when he wants to—and _strong_ , and capable, and I just … I trust him.” She glances at her mother just in time to catch the knowing spark that lights up her eyes. “And I’m rambling, aren’t I?”

“You’re in love,” Leandra teases, before her expression turns serious again. “Why did you never tell me about him before?”

“To avoid this exact conversation, I suppose,” she replies with a shrug. “And we’re sort of figuring it out as we go. Telling my mother just seemed so darned _official_.”

“Fair, but I would have spared myself the trouble of finding you a suitable match had I known you had one already.”

Hawke tries her sweetest smile. “Does that mean I don’t have to go to the Harimanns' tomorrow night?”

“Spoken like your father’s daughter,” Leandra laughs. “Although this only goes to show that you take after me quite a lot, too. Now I know how my mother must have felt long ago.”

“I’m not pregnant, though, so you still have one up on me.”

Leandra doesn’t clutch her heart or thank the Maker or any of the things Hawke might have expected—instead she grows indrawn and quiet, the furrows on her brow like clouds over the blue of her eyes. “And you know, it wouldn’t change a thing if you were,” she says after a moment. “You’re my daughter no matter what, and it was unfair of me to expect you to choose after my own mother made me.”

Hawke drops her gaze to her big toe poking through a hole in her sock, while an ache swells like a bloom inside her ribcage. “You and Grandmother never spoke again after you left, right?”

“No. I wasn’t her daughter anymore once I’d made the decision to leave,” Leandra sighs. “Your grandfather had said he would forgive me, even allow me not to marry and raise my child as an Amell if I left Malcolm, but I couldn’t do that any more than you can leave Fenris, I reckon.”

“You never told me this,” she blurts out, though she’s never _asked_. Much of her parents’ past was pieced together from fragments of conversation and half-faded memories, some of which—namely the part where Grey Wardens whisked them away to Ferelden on griffons—she suspected were mere figments of her overzealous imagination. “I always imagined Grandfather just about cast you out into the streets when he found out you were with child.”

“If only. Things would have been so much easier to bear if the choice had been made for me. But no, I knowingly gave up everything to be with Malcolm.”

She steals a glance at her mother out of the corner of her eye. She’s never thought of it that way, not really. At times it’s hard to remember that the woman who would send her to bed early for teasing the twins once forsook family and fortune for love, to remember that she hasn’t always been her _mother_.

Once she was the most beautiful woman in the world, able to cast off the worst of heartaches with a few soothing words, but then Father died, and Mother’s own magic with him. It was selfish, she knew, to resent Leandra for not being the buttress she needed then. Hawke had no choice but to weather her grief on her own, and stir the twins through theirs, poor navigator that she was, because their mother was too disconsolate to kiss it all better. Instead, the garments she was to mend were left piling up on her sewing table while Hawke had to steal into Danal’s cellar to cry a few tears at a time, all those long nights she worked the tavern.

Strange it should be now, years after his passing, that she realises just how much her mother must have loved her father, and how much she must have hurt then, and how much she must still hurt now.

Warmth rushes up to her face, tickling her nose. “Were you happy, at least? You _looked_ happy, but … maybe it’s just how I chose to remember it,” she ends in a whisper.

“Some days were—difficult,” Leandra answers after a moment. “I don’t think your father ever really understood: he had everything to gain by leaving the Circle, unlike me, but for every moment of doubt or sorrow he also made me feel such _joy_ ,” she says, pressing one hand to her mouth when her voice cracks on the last word. Then she blinks the glint out of her eyes, swallows hard, and smiles at her. “I don’t know if I’d do it any differently. We had some wonderful years all five of us together.”

“That we did.” Hawke clears the grief out of her throat before returning the smile. “Imagine just how different things would’ve been if you’d stayed. You and I might still be sitting on these very steps, but Father would’ve gone back to the Circle, and the twins would never have been born. The world might have been better off without Carver, though,” she adds in jest, biting back the laughter to apologise when her mother cuts a reproachful look to her. “Sorry, Mother. You know I love my baby brother very much.”

“I know, but I think _he_ forgets sometimes.”

Hawke makes a note to remind him in the sort of gooey letter that will mottle his face red with embarrassment. “How about I make myself forgiven by going to the Harimanns’ tomorrow? But in exchange you have to promise not to try to set me up with any of the coxcombs there and to give Fenris a chance.”

“As long as you promise not to call any of them ‘coxcomb’ to his face,” Leandra says sternly, though her eyes are dancing.

“Promise,” she replies, then breaks into a grin. “You know, come to think of it, Fenris and I almost missed each other, too. I would’ve turned that job down if I didn’t need the coin so badly.” No way she was going to help _Templars_ get their fix, she remembered thinking while Anso blathered on about his stolen cargo, but the blasted Deep Roads expedition loomed ever closer and she couldn’t afford to be picky. “Maybe Bran’s son would’ve stood a chance if I hadn’t met Fenris first.”

Leandra tilts her head, one pearl-drop earring resting against the curve of her jaw. “What job? You said you two met at the Hanged Man.”

“Oh. Did I? Aren’t you getting mixed up with Isabela?”

She shakes her head, soft silver-threaded strands swaying about her face. “No, I’m certain it was Fenris. You spilled ale on his feet, and you said they were nice feet.”

_Me and my big mouth_. Well, that did happen, at least: Hawke splashed the contents of the tankard she’d just bought him all over his feet when she tripped over a loose floorboard, the first time she took him to meet Varric. Fenris shook the ale off his toes without word, his face hard as marble, and if she’s ever _wished_ for the Templars to burst into the room and drag her away from further embarrassment, then that was it. “Nothing like a good ale wash,” she squeaked at him. “The floor here is just so _dirty_.”

Amazingly, he cracked a smile then, and he and Varric commiserated over the pain in the arse that she was while Fenris wiped his feet with the (obnoxiously fancy) gimp-trimmed towel the dwarf lent him.

It just made for a far better story to tell her mother than lyrium smuggling and an ambush.

“Alright, maybe that wasn’t the _first_ first time,” Hawke tries.

Her mother rolls her eyes even as a smile tugs at her lips. “Come, let’s get you cleaned up,” she starts, pulling herself up to her feet, “and maybe you can tell me about the _first_ first time you two met.”

“Yes, Mother,” she says, returning the smile as she starts after her. Maybe if she leaves out the heart-ripping and cuts by half the number of Tevinter slave-hunters involved …

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hello on [Tumblr](https://aban-asaara.tumblr.com/)!


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